Pempheris mangula

Pempheris mangula View in CoL vs. P. rhomboidea

The second species claimed by Koeda et al. (2014) for the Red Sea is Pempheris mangula Cuvier , for which they mistakenly list P. rhomboidea Kossmann & Räuber, 1877 , type locality Eritrea, as a junior synonym. One would not expect to find P. mangula in the Red Sea based on its habitat alone, a coast of the mud-bottom Bay of Bengal. Randall & Bineesh (2014) now clearly show that P. mangula , based on the neotype collected by Bineesh from the type locality of Visakhapatnam, is not a senior synonym of P. rhomboidea . It is separated by its high gill-raker count of 30–34, compared to 27–30 for P. mangula , larger eye ( 6.95–7.5 in SL vs. 7.3–8.4 in SL for P. mangula ), longer pectoral fins ( 2.85–3.2 in SL vs. 3.5–3.65 for P. mangula ), and shorter prepelvic length ( 2.5–2.6 in SL vs. 2.65–2.7 in SL for P. mangula ). Randall & Bineesh (2014) described the neotype from Visakhapatnam prior to Koeda et al. (2014), and a recent specimen from the type locality is shown in Fig. 3 View FIGURE 3 .

Furthermore, Koeda et al. (2014) mistakenly used DNA sequences from specimens from Oman and Mozambique to represent P. mangula , and thus found little genetic difference from Red Sea P. rhomboidea . Notably however, GenBank had COI sequences specifically from Visakhapatnam, publically available since 2007 ( Lakra et al., 2011), but these were not considered by Koeda et al. (2014), since their studies were limited to the 16S marker. The COI sequences clearly show a 1.1% divergence (minimum interspecific distance by K2P and pairwise) between type-locality P. mangula and P. rhomboidea from the Red Sea ( Randall & Bineesh, 2014) ( Fig. 2 View FIGURE 2 ).